BOA Blog

Zone 3 on Geffrey Davis' Revising the Storm

January 16, 2015

According to a Zone 3review, Revising the Storm reaches "for something beyond the personal, through the personal" in an attempt to make sense of the past. "Occasionally, these poems break through their cohesive, straight-laced narratives into something I and many other readers will find much more interesting. Inside the effort to 'revise the storm,' speakers stumble upon the problems inherent in memory."
Reviewer Robert Campbell calls Davis "first and foremost, a hypnotic, arresting storyteller. These are poems for the ear and for the heart." Revising the Stormis a collection of poems that wrestles with the problems we face when trying to make sense of the pain of past experience. "Does it control us, or do we, as poets, construct it? How do we, as tellers of the tale, engage with this god-like power, these phantoms that shape us, this series of flat images, this very architecture of us that is as uncontrollable as our parentage, as the weather itself, and yet also, paradoxically, the story we build for ourselves, clause by clause?"
"This is a book of poems for those who believe in the cathartic power of poetry and its ability to render meaning from pain. Despite its lagging moments, Revising the Storm succeeds at transforming loss and grief into something worth sharing, and beyond any discussion of Davis’s romantic conceits or clever self-reflexivity, doesn’t that matter more? After all, if poetry can’t save us from our suffering, what can?"
Click here to read the full review at Zone 3.
Revising the Storm is available at the BOA Bookstore.